Help me organize my music.
I have 45 GB of music in my iTunes library
(…)
How do you keep your music library organized?
My advice regarding library organization is always unpopular and always ignored, but hear me out here: delete most of your music.
This works for me, because I have a specific way of listening to music, and may not work so well for other people, but at least give it a chance. If you’re like me, you don’t listen to most of your music very regularly. In fact, you tend to have ~5-8 albums on constant rotation, switching one in and another out every week or so. Thus, if you’re like me, you don’t need that much music in your iTunes library. Anything that isn’t a regular listen? Delete it. Don’t back it up, don’t archive it somewhere, don’t give it any funny smart playlist-referenced tags, just fucking delete it.
iTunes isn’t suited to huge libraries of music. After a certain point, depending on your computer’s specifications, it will start taking longer and longer to launch, you’ll see more of that “Loading iTunes library” bar, and iTunes will become hell to use. iTunes is for music you listen to, not for music you own. Archive that somewhere else. (At the very least, remove it from your library and archive the files to an external HD or something.)
Sounds wasteful, you say? If you deleted something you ripped from a CD, rip it again next time you want it. If you downloaded it from some illicit file-sharing site, you’ll be able to again, probably in less than 10 minutes if you look in the right places (hell, less than a minute is possible). And if you own it on vinyl, I’m pretty sure you’re breaking some law by listening to an MP3 instead (but I don’t know how fucked up the law is over there in Canada).
Once you pare your library down to just music you listen to, you’ll find it infinitely more manageable. I understand the urge to hoard all the music you own in one place and never delete anything, as long as disk space allows. I did that too — around 220GB was my peak, I think — but since getting it down to a far more manageable 20GB or so (if it all fits on your iPod, ur doin it rite), my life is much easier, I spend less time deciding what I want to listen to, and it’s easier to find once I do.
MP3s are a fantastic way to archive your music (but FLAC and OGG are better), and I sympathise when people would rather not delete their music collections, which is why backing it up to an external HD is just as good an option as simply deleting it. If you have over a certain amount — if your gigabytes are in triple digits, you’re pushing it — you’re not a music listener, you’re a music collector, and that shit doesn’t belong in your everyday library, because you don’t listen to it all (impossible), it belongs backed up somewhere where nothing will ever happen to your precious digital files.
Endnote: I always think it’s funny when these kind of posts come up (on Tumblr, on a forum, on Yahoo! Answers, or whatever), and there’s always one dude who’s like, “my library’s 500GB! I have all the music in the WORLD! Here’s how I organise it…” First question: Really dude, that’s nice, how long did you spend organising that? Days, you say? Oh, weeks! Good grief. And how much of it has a play count above zero? Oh, almost none of it? Well, that seems like time well spent. “ALL THE MUSIC IN THE WORLD!!!”
I see your point, nostrich, and I guess that’s my reasoning behind not having a hard disc iPod, but instead relying on my phone’s memory (HTC Excalibur, 2GB RAM, going 8GB after OS upgrade) for music on the go. (And this way I get to carry only one gadget with me). But for my library, that’s another story.
I want a bigger hard drive. I want two, as a matter of fact, so I can have a reliable backup. And I seldom delete anything. It must really suck in order to be deleted. This is not to say I keep lots of mediocre stuff; I prefer to think that I’ve developed a sense of what music to get. And I don’t delete if I don’t have a good reason to.
You said it right: I’m a collector. And collectors have other motivations added to the listening. But I am actually a listener, no doubt about it. You pose an interesting question: how many tracks have been played exactly 0 times? I just checked my office’s small library (67GB only, this is not THE library; music here comes and goes) and I’ve listened to almost 50% of the tracks. And that without counting:
- Music I’ve brought from home, which I’ve heard there but not here.
- New music I’ve got in the last 10 days or less, that I’ve not had the time to listen to yet.
- Music I’ve not listened to @office or @home, but indeed @car.
Considering this, I guess I’ve listened more than 70% of these 67GB.
My advice? (not that anybody asked for it, and at the risk of sounding like flame-war bait) Delete iTunes. It sucks with big collections. It sucks most of the time. The interface is slick and clean, and Coverflow looks beautiful. But to me, the magic stops there. Listening to small collections is an acceptable experience. But for collection keeping, it’s awful. I use MediaMonkey. So you have an iPod? Great: MM syncs happily to it. My wife gave up on syncing her music to her iPhone through iTunes and is using MM now. They claim they perform well with collections of 100,000+ songs. I still don’t get there (many CDs to rip yet), but so far, it performs quite well, does the housekeeping my collector-self needs easily, and lets me play and sync to my devices. I love features like “find more from the same… album / artist / genre…” These are more for the listener than for the collector, and they’re great. By the way, no, I am not affiliated in any way to these guys. Just a loyal user for some years now.
You may be right on this: organize your filesystem. This approach is more “future-proof” than compromising 100% to any library software. Filesystems haven’t changed much in many years, and won’t likely do. And a decent library software can definitely help you with actually organizing at the filesystem level, too.
I believe that eventually, the “store everything” approach will become pointless (if and) when a reasonable business model allows me to play whatever I want whenever I want to. But once there, I guess I will still have a collection. Not a TB collection of music, but a big collection of metadata about music: who else likes this band, what movie featured this song, what was the playlist during our honeymoon (yes: I’ve erased the mini-discs, but I still keep the playlist), what do I like to listen to while cooking a nice dinner with my wife, on the car with the kids, what bands has this guitar player played with, what other versions does this song have (official, bootleg, remix, cover, live… ), the artwork of everything, pictures of the members, links to their sites, an introduction to this or that genre or subgenre…
Discogs, Wikipedia, AllMusicGuide, Boxee, Last.fm, every other social network… The pieces are already getting there. We just need the music industry to change their so-last-century mindset, create a new business model where the cornerstone of all this, music, becomes easily (and legally, and unexpensively) available to anyone. Until that day, my collection will keep on growing, and I will keep on trimming and grooming and nourishing it. And listening, of course.
